Cry for the Strangers (36 page)

“I’m not through with you yet.”

Brad turned back to face the police chief. When he spoke his voice was every bit as cold as Whalen’s had been.

“Aren’t you? I think you are, Whalen. You aren’t questioning us at all. You’re accusing us. Now I’m not a lawyer, but I know damned well, and I suspect you know it too, that there’s no way you can talk to us if we don’t want to talk to you. Not without a lawyer here anyway.”

Once more he started for the door with Glen behind him. This time Harney Whalen didn’t try to stop them. He simply watched them go, hating them, wishing they
had never come to Clark’s Harbor, wishing they would leave him and his town in peace.

His fury and frustration mounting, Whalen put on his overcoat and rain hat and stalked out of his office. As he passed through the door of the police station, the loiterers quickly scattered, reading his ugly mood.

He started toward the wharf, unsure of where he was going or why. When he got to the wharf he turned north and began walking up the beach. The tide had peaked and was on its way out, and as he walked in the rain, the wind licking at him, his anger seemed to recede.

He walked the beach all morning and well into the afternoon.

He walked alone, silently.

As he walked, the storm swelled.

Bobby and Missy sat on the floor of their tiny bedroom, a checkerboard between them. Bobby stared sullenly at the board. No matter what he did, Missy was going to jump his last man and win the third straight game.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” he said.

“You have to move,” Missy replied.

“I don’t either. I can concede.”

“Move,” Missy insisted. “I want to jump you.”

“You win anyway,” Robby said. He stood up and went to look out the window. “Let’s go outside,” he said suddenly. From the floor Missy stared at him, her eyes wide with fear.

“We can’t do that. Mommy said we have to stay in today. It’s raining.”

“I like it when it rains.”

“I don’t. Not when it rains like this. Bad things happen.”

“Oh, come on,” Robby urged her. “It’s not even six o’clock. We can climb out the window, like I did last time. We’ll go down to the Randalls’ and come back with Daddy.”

“I don’t think we should.”

“Scaredy-cat.”

“That’s right!” Missy exclaimed. “And you should be too!” Her mouth quivered, partly from fear but more from embarrassment at having admitted her fear.

“Well, I’m not afraid. I like it out there!” Robby pulled their raincoats out of the closet and began putting his on.

“I’m not going,” Missy insisted.

“Who cares?” Robby asked with a show of unconcern. “I’ll go by myself.”

“I’m going to tell,” Missy challenged, her eyes narrowing.

“If you do I’ll beat you up,” Robby threatened.

“You won’t either.”

Robby pulled on his boots. “Are you coming or not?”

“No,” Missy said.

“All right for you then.” He opened the window and clambered out. As soon as he was gone Missy ran to the window, pulled it shut, and latched it. Then she went into the other room, where Rebecca was sitting in front of the fire, knitting.

“Robby went outside,” she said.

“Outside? What do you mean, he went outside?”

“He put on his raincoat and climbed out the window,” Missy explained.

Rebecca dropped her knitting and ran to the tiny
bedroom, hoping her daughter was playing a joke on her.

“Robby? Robby, where are you?”

“I
told
you, he went outside,” Missy insisted.

Rebecca ran to the door, pulled it open, and started to step outside, but the storm drove her back in. She shielded her face and tried to see into the growing darkness.

“Robby? Robby!” she called. “Robby, come back here.” But the wind and the pounding surf of the cresting tide drowned her words.

She thought desperately, wondering what to do, and immediately knew she would have to go find him. If only Glen were here, she thought. If only he hadn’t gone down to the Randalls’. But he had. She would have to find Robby alone.

“I’ll go get him,” she told Missy. “You stay here.”

“By myself?” Missy asked. She looked terrified.

“I’ll only be gone a few minutes,” Rebecca assured her. “Only until I find Robby.”

“I don’t want to stay by myself,” Missy wailed. “I want to go too.”

Rebecca tried to think it out but she was too upset. Her instincts told her to make Missy stay by herself, but the thought of having both her children alone frightened her even more than the idea of taking Missy with her.

“All right,” she said. “Put on your raincoat and your boots, but hurry!”

Missy darted into the bedroom and came back with the coat and boots that Robby had already pulled from the closet. Rebecca pulled her own coat on, then helped Missy. A minute later, clutching a flashlight
with one hand and Missy with the other, Rebecca left the cabin. A sudden gusting of the storm snuffed out the lantern just before she closed the door.

The wind whipped at her and drove the pounding rain through every small gap in her raincoat. Before they were a hundred feet from the house, both Rebecca and Missy were soaked to the skin.

“I want to go home,” Missy wailed.

“We have to find Robby,” Rebecca shouted. “Which way did he go?”

“He said he was going out on the beach.” Missy was running now to keep up with Rebecca.

They stayed as close to the high-water line as they could, hurrying down the beach. The flashlight was almost useless, its beam refracting madly in the down-pour, shattering into a thousand pinpoints of light that illuminated nothing, but made the darkness seem even blacker than it was.

Suddenly Missy stopped and yanked at her mother’s hand.

“Someone’s here,” she said.

Rebecca flashed the light around with a shaking hand. “Robby?” she called. “Roobbeeeee!”

She turned so that her back was to the wind and called out again. There was no answer, but she suddenly felt the sharp sting of an electrical shock as a bolt of lightning flashed out of the sky and grounded itself in the nearby forest. And, she was sure, there was something behind her: an unfamiliar presence.

A presence she knew was not her son.

She dropped Missy’s hand.

“Run, Missy! Run as fast as you can.”

And then, as she watched Missy dash off into the
darkness, she felt something slide around her neck.

It was an arm, a strong arm, and it was choking her. She tried to scream but her voice wouldn’t respond. She tried to batter at the arm with the flashlight, but the pressure on her neck only increased.

No
, she thought.
Not like this. Please, God, no …

Missy ran into the darkness, not knowing which way she was going. She only knew she was going away.

Away from her mother.

Away from whoever was with her mother.

Then she stumbled and fell into the sand, crying out into the darkness.

“Missy? Is that you?” She couldn’t see who was calling to her but she recognized the voice.

“Robby? Where are you?”

“Over here. Come on.”

She scrambled toward his voice and found herself blocked by a log.

“Climb over,” Robby urged.

Then she was beside him, crouched down behind the log, peering over the top of it into the darkness. In the distance the beam of the flashlight danced crazily, then suddenly fell to the ground and went out.

“What’s happening?” Robby asked.

“It’s Mommy,” Missy sobbed. “Someone’s out there—”

A bolt of lightning split the darkness, and the two children saw their mother. She was on her knees and there was a shape behind her, looming over her, holding her neck, forcing her head forward …

A shiver of excitement made Robby tremble, and
he could feel every muscle in his body tense with anticipation.

The light faded from the sky and the roar of thunder rolled over them, drowning the scream that was welling from Missy’s throat. It was as if the storm was clutching at Robby, immobilizing him.

“Let’s go home, Missy,” Robby whispered. He forced himself to take his sobbing sister by the hand and lead her into the woods. Then, as the beach disappeared from their view, he began running, pulling Missy behind him.

Rebecca’s struggles grew weaker. She was blacking out. Time began to stretch for her, and she thought she could feel her blood desperately trying to suck oxygen from her strangled lungs.

Then she heard a crack, sharp, close to her ear, and she realized she could no longer move. It was as if she had lost all contact with her body.

My neck, she thought curiously. My neck is broken.

A second later Rebecca Palmer lay dead on Sod Beach.

26

The Coleman lantern on the dining-room table began to fade, and Glen Palmer reached out to pump it up just as the bolt of lightning that had illuminated Rebecca’s death a hundred yards away also flooded the Randalls’ house with light. Reflexively, Glen snatched his hand away from the lantern, then chuckled. Brad Randall looked up from the chart he was poring over.

“Maybe we should give it up for today,” Brad said. “I don’t know about you but my eyes are getting tired. I’m not used to lantern light.”

They had been at it all afternoon, charting the various events that had occurred in Clark’s Harbor, from the deaths of Pete and Miriam Shelling all the way back to the frighteningly similar demise of Frank and Myrtle Baron years earlier. Over the years there had been several fatalities in the area, usually in the vicinity of Sod Beach, always on stormy nights when the coast was battered by high winds. And as far as they could tell, most of the victims, if not all, had been strangers to Clark’s Harbor. Strangers who had come to the Harbor for various reasons and intended to settle there.

“It’s like the Indian legends,” Glen commented as
they stared at the charts. “It’s almost as if the beach itself doesn’t want strangers here—as if it waits, gathers its forces, then strikes out at people.”

“Which makes a nice story,” Brad said archly. “But I don’t believe it for a minute. There’s another explanation but I’m damned if I know how to go about finding it.”

Glen thought a moment. “What about Robby?” he asked.

“Robby?”

“You said that the beach affects him. If that’s true, couldn’t it affect someone else too?”

Brad smiled wryly. “Sure. But it doesn’t help the problem. Until I know
how
the beach affects Robby, how can I figure out who else might be affected? So far
I
don’t have the slightest idea what the common denominator might be.”

Elaine appeared in the doorway. “Getting anywhere?” She looked drawn and tired.

“I wish we were,” Brad said. “But so far it’s nothing but dead ends. Apparently the storms are killing people, which is, of course, ridiculous.”

“What about Missy? Hasn’t anybody talked to her?”

The two men stared blankly at Elaine, wondering what she was talking about. A memory suddenly flashed into Brad’s mind, a memory of Robby, talking to him on the beach.

“Missy thinks she sees things.”

Did Elaine know something about that too?

“What about Missy?” he asked quietly. The tone of his voice, the seriousness with which he asked the question, frightened Glen, but Elaine’s answer frightened him even more.

“I think Missy saw Jeff Horton get killed,” she said. There was a flatness to her voice that somehow emphasized her words. “I haven’t talked to her but she said something last night. I—I told her that her daddy had gone out on the beach, and she said, ‘He shouldn’t have done that. Bad things happen there.’ That’s all she said, but I got the strangest feeling that she’d seen what happened to Jeff, or at least had seen
something.”

Glen sat in stunned silence, but Brad was nodding thoughtfully. “Robby told me awhile ago that Missy thinks she sees things on the beach,” he murmured.

Glen suddenly found his voice. “Things?” he asked, his word edged with hysteria. “What kind of things?”

“He didn’t say,” Brad replied quietly. “I was going to talk to her about it but then everything started happening, and …” his voice trailed off, his words sounding hollow.

Glen stood up and pulled on his coat.

“Then we’ll talk to her now. I’ll go get Rebecca and bring her and the kids back here.”

Brad glanced out into the blackness of the storm. “You want me to drive you? It’s getting pretty dark out there.”

“No thanks,” Glen replied. “I’ll walk along the beach. It doesn’t look so bad out there now.” He finished buttoning his coat and opened the door. The wind caught it and slammed it back against the kitchen wall.

“Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”

Glen grinned crookedly. “You mean because of last night? They say if you fall off a horse the best thing
to do is get right back up and ride him again. If I don’t walk the beach tonight I never will.”

He pulled the door closed behind him and disappeared into the rain.

Glen leaned forward into the wind, his right hand clutching the collar of his coat in a useless attempt to keep the rain out. His left hand, plunged deep in his coat pocket, was balled into a fist, and he kept his eyes squinted tightly against the stinging rain.

He made his way slowly, keeping close to the surf line, keeping his head down, watching the sand at his feet. Every few seconds he looked up, searching the darkness for the soft glow that should be coming from the cabin windows. Then, as the glow failed to appear out of the darkness, he began to worry and picked up his pace.

When he had walked nearly a hundred yards and felt the cabin should be dearly visible, he stopped and stared into the darkness, as if by concentrating hard enough he could force the dim light of the kerosene lanterns to appear in front of him. But still there was only blackness, and his concern turned to fear.

He began to run, no longer watching his steps, but straining his eyes to find the cabin, the cabin where Rebecca and the children would be waiting for him.

He tripped, sprawling headlong into the sand, his right hand only partially breaking his fall, his left hand, suddenly entangled in his pocket, useless.